June 15, 2012

White House petition for public access to research reaches goal of 25,000 signatures

The movement to make taxpayer-funded research freely available online hit a new milestone on Sunday when advocates hit their goal of 25,000 signatures to a "We the People" petition to the Obama administration. The petition, created by Access2Research (a group of Open Access advocates, including SPARC's Executive Director, Heather Joseph), requests that President Obama make taxpayer-funded research freely available.

According to the petition site's rules, any petition securing 25,000 signatures within 30 days will be sent to the White House Chief of Staff, and will receive an official response. The Open Access petition hit the 25,000 mark in half the allotted time.

[...]

The petition says: "We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research."

The Open Access mandate builds on the National Institutes of Health's policy, noting that that agency's experience "proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process," urging the president "to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research."